Metamorphosis

I see documentaries as a way to tell stories about people who inspire me and other people as well.

During a vacation in the interior mountain villages, we were talking to a local resident, the last resident of what is the smallest village, the one at the highest altitude. While we were talking, a family arrived with the intention of visiting her. They had seen her in a television report and came to satisfy their curiosity: “how can you live here alone?”, they asked.

The concepts of modernity associated with globalized and standardized behaviors and ways of thinking often advocate the inferiority of rural men in relation to urban men. Therefore, that question shocked me and led me to look for a different rationale in the history of these places and these people.

If it is true that our personal characteristics and personality traits are influenced by genetics, it is no less true that the environment in which we live defines our history, our behaviors, the dreams that determine our life goals. And, precisely, the environment of rural areas has always been determined by centrally established laws and regulations, based on different political sensitivities, following the principles of sustainability, but almost always without taking into account the feelings and ways of life of local populations.

And these villages underwent a social transformation determined by factors of modernity, during which their inhabitants freed themselves from the social forms of a rural society with ways of life determined by subsistence economies, opening a new field of identity formation and social actions.

In this film I intend to deconstruct the basic concepts and certainties of modern society.

“Metamorphosis” follows three villagers with common ties to tell the story of three villages and the stigmas that their inhabitants carried from years of social transformations associated with environmental changes.

“Metamorphosis” is a film about the relationship between communities with different cultural origins, but above all, about relationships between people, dialogue, empathy and respect for human dignity.

Throughout the research, I frequently came across the name of a man. He was the youngest of four brothers, but the only one who never left the village. He had been a forestry sapper, catechist, beekeeper, shepherd. He was known as a cultured man, despite having only basic education - I often heard that, when he went to the mountains with his flock, he took his books with him and sat under a tree. Maybe that is why he never accepted the fortune of fate. It was he who, with enthusiasm and voluntarism, mobilized the inhabitants of the four neighboring villages for a unique process of recovery, material and immaterial.

The simple story of this vulgar man was the motivation for this film.

In this context, in “Metamorphosis”, I want to emphasize the power of the human spirit in its battle against adversity. I intend to show that it depends on each of us, through the construction of our own history, to be able to play a relevant role in inclusive social development.

When making “Metamorphosis” I intended for the film to have its own language, both in terms of color and structure. I believed that I could make a film that tells the story of what was happening to people in the countryside, making the audience feel the same way I felt throughout my research: the importance of resilience, dissatisfaction, enthusiasm, self-esteem – both individual and collective – in the commitment to building a future free from stereotypes.

As the story of “Metamorphosis” evolved, it became important to avoid tiring the public with dialogues and interviews. That is why I tried to achieve a balance between interviews and dialogues that tell stories from the past, with scenes that portray how some traditions are being transported to the present day, here and there, interspersed with everyday, casual and funny scenes, in a sequence in which the personality of each character contributes to the spirit of the film.

I tried to keep the intimacy and variations of emotion between joy, nostalgia and sadness, through music and color and the interaction between them, and the overlapping of descriptions of the past with scenes from the present that represent the subsequent loss of that world. I tried not to be explicit and leave room for subjectivity.